


Rise

by littledust



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Strippers & Strip Clubs, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 18:13:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5258669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littledust/pseuds/littledust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel doesn't leave a note for her mother, doesn't look back as she leaps into the air. What would she say? <i>I love you. Don't come looking for me. Try to stay alive.</i></p>
<p>(Angel's escapes, from her childhood home to Trask Industries.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [garrideb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/garrideb/gifts).



There isn't much to pack, in the end. Angel throws some clothes and food in a duffle bag. She has a small wad of cash from waitressing. Some she stuffs into her shoe, some she rolls up tightly inside a pair of socks. She lingers over her childhood treasures: rocks with bright veins of color, the doll her abuela sewed her mother when she was young, the carefully clipped newspaper image of Elvis Presley. She doesn't want to take any of it, her wings already buzzing under her skin, demanding release.

In the end, she takes the doll so that her mother will know that she hasn't been kidnapped. No, she's just another runaway on the way to Los Angeles, ready to get swallowed up by the big, bad city.

That's fine. Angel would rather get eaten by something that doesn't pound its fists into her mother, something that has bright lights and the promise of freedom.

Angel packs all night. The minute the first gray signs of dawn appear, she takes her things down to her front steps. It's quiet out here, the sky huge. Eyes closed, she shrugs off her jacket and rolls her shoulders back, enjoying the stretch through her muscles. Already she feels like she can _breathe_ , like just deciding to leave widened the capacity of her lungs.

And then her wings unfold.

She was born with the marks, otherwise her stepfather would have had words with her mother about her harlot daughter getting tattooed. Angel only learned the trick of calling out her wings a few years ago, when a neighbor's dog leapt its too-small fence and started chasing her. Even on the run, frightened tears streaming down her face, Angel had marveled at the feeling of flight.

Her wings won't take her all the way to LA before there are people awake to spot the girl built like a dragonfly, but they can get her far enough to hitch a ride the rest of the way.

Angel doesn't leave a note for her mother, doesn't look back as she leaps into the air. What would she say? _I love you. Don't come looking for me. Try to stay alive._

*

Charles and Erik are way better-looking than Angel's normal clientele. The beautiful face (Charles) and beautiful body (Erik) don't guarantee a good time, though. Guys who come in pairs can be the easiest customers when what they really crave is a night in the arms of a man, wanting a girl only for the pretense. They can be the worst when they're trying to one-up each other, wanting a girl as a point of pride.

"You know it's double for both, right?" is a line that strides the right line of flirtatious, but Angel wants no illusions about price. If they want to mess around with her, if they get their rocks off by watching each other get a lap dance, she demands her cut.

These guys, though, turn out to be interested in something else. Angel doesn't bat an eyelash when the champagne bucket sails through the air; she's run into a mutant or two in her time, though no one with this level of control. _You're here to take me away,_ she doesn't say, because that much is clear. The shiver under her skin means it's time to go, time to take wing again.

Angel unhooks her top and shows Charles and Erik her wings without a second thought. Los Angeles delivered on its promise, in a sense: she doesn't have to watch her mother get beaten whenever her stepfather is in a bad mood. On the other hand, there are plenty of guys who love to rough strippers up, and something inside Angel shrinks and hides whenever she hears flesh striking flesh. She used to dream of saving her mother. With the other girls at the club, she just avoids their eyes.

This time, Angel takes more with her. She's earned the right to the cosmetics, and the shoes, and the hairbrush with a pretty handle. Charles and Erik take her back to her crummy apartment while she grabs the last of her stuff, doll included. They don't comment on the filthy building, though they each notice it in their own separate ways. Charles lifts his eyebrows for a fraction of a second before schooling his face into something neutral. Erik notices the dirt, accepts it, and moves on.

Angel doesn't fly off with her wings this time, but they get her out all the same. 

*

The other mutants promise safety, promise sanctuary for people like her. Angel starts to believe them when no one asks her to take off her clothes or do more than her fair share of the washing up. Raven tells her how excited she is to meet another girl who can shift, not a trace of mockery or malice in her voice. Angel's heart feels like it has wings, and it hums from friend to friend.

When Charles and Erik leave, though, the CIA suits aren't shy about leering at them. Angel's got her fair share of armor for creepy stares, but these looks promise even worse. The guys at the club didn't carry guns.

So when everything explodes, Angel screams in terror and huddles close to Raven, but she isn't surprised. Seems like the pattern follows her around no matter where she goes. It was stupid to take up the offer to join the secret mutant club. Like all the other guys in her life, Charles and Erik are gone after the fun is over and Angel could use a little protection.

It's the guys with the guns and the fists that get to make the rules. Angel watches Sebastian Shaw extend a hand and thinks, _Bullets bounce off this guy. Maybe no one will be able to touch me, either._

The others look at her like they're puppies she just kicked. Angel tries to explain, but chokes on the words, the fear still burning the back of her throat. She can see no one else understands: Alex and Darwin in denial, Sean shaking his head, Hank's brow creased, Raven's eyes large and liquid with tears.

When Sebastian Shaw feeds Darwin a bolt of Alex's plasma, Angel tells herself that she, at least, will survive. _Adapt to survive_ will never be her words to claim, but _escape to survive_ rolls familiar on her tongue.

*

The Brotherhood of Mutants promises nothing but a chance for Angel to regrow her wing in peace after Havok sliced through it in Cuba. The wing itself doesn't have the nerve endings to feel much, but the absence hurts, the patch of plain skin where the completed outline of her wing should be. She huddles in whatever underground bunker Emma Frost found for them and thinks, _Grow. Come back._ Doesn't think, _I deserved it after Darwin._

At first, she and Mystique don't talk much. Angel betrayed the others first, Mystique just as much as Charles. Angel could be bitter about her hypocrisy, but it makes a twisted kind of sense. Besides, Angel is smarting at the betrayals in her life. Erik--no, Magneto--murdered her invulnerable boss. Not even Sebastian Shaw could stop the bullets and the bombs, and Magneto clearly doesn't know how to control a gun. Too many changes, too many lies she's fed herself to help her sleep at night. Angel stays with the Brotherhood and does nothing for their cause.

The others grumble for a while as she refuses mission after mission, even recon missions that require no powers, but Angel makes sure that she pulls her own weight. Someone has to do the cooking, the cleaning, the grocery shopping every time they stay somewhere for longer than a day or two. It makes her sick, acting as maid to the Brotherhood, but it's safe.

When her wing grows back, Angel stays grounded. If she pretends to be damaged beyond repair, the others won't ask her to do more than she does now. Magneto has strange ethics, and they extend to battle scars.

Mystique talks to her more after Magneto gets arrested for good in 1963. She seems lonely, more than a little bitter that acting as Magneto's lapdog got her nowhere. She still has so much fire, so much drive to save mutants from tyranny. She's more beautiful now, in her blue skin and burning righteousness, than she was in blonde curls and aimless drifting.

Angel looks at her and thinks, _Maybe._ But when she reaches for the part of herself that desires, her hands come up empty save for ashes.

This time, she leaves on foot. No one follows her, anyway.

*

Angel stays away from dancing for a while. She's not making a bad wage as a waitress in D.C., and it's kind of fun to serve senators that the Brotherhood once tried to assassinate. Usually the senators stick to swankier restaurants, but there's one that likes the pickles her diner uses on the sandwiches. Weird, rich people stuff.

Then the manager starts screwing one of the waitresses, and somehow Angel's shifts get cut down, and cut down, and cut down. _Don't you want your little girlfriend around more at home?_ Angel wonders, but she doesn't say a thing. She doesn't have much in the way of conversation these days.

When the choice comes down to rent or food, Angel clamps down on the part of her that swore never again. She's still got her body, still got a way of smiling that covers the deadness in her eyes. She finds a little club, gets a little side gig, and it's enough to pay the bills. As long as she's got a roof over her head and a bite to eat, it's a living.

The job pays enough. Angel could make more if she did more for her tips, but part of her still remembers going into battle, spitting acid in the face of her enemies. She can't bring herself to do anything more than the minimum. _You're lucky you're pretty,_ her new boss says. _Guys like the tattoos. They like the tough girl crap. Just make sure you play nice with them or you're out._

Angel picked up a trick or two from Emma Frost. She might not be a telepath, but she's figured out how to make men think they're getting what they want without having to give too much of herself away. For a while, she thinks she's doing fine.

Giving herself away comes in another form, it turns out. Everyone always asks about the tattoos on her back. She tells a different story every time about where they come from and what they signify. That doesn't deter the creep who shows up asking too many questions. He comes back again and again. He tips well, Angel _and_ her boss, so Angel tries not to kick up a fuss about the way her skin crawls when she's near him. All he ever wants to do is ask her questions about where the tattoos come from, and wouldn't it be funny if they were real.

One night, she gets a drugged drink and a bag over her head. She tries to scream, but all that comes out of her mouth is a soft mewl, like a baby animal.

Angel went back to dancing in nightclubs kicking and screaming. She leaves with hardly a sound.

*

Her captor is named Bolivar Trask. Angel, doped up on whatever painkillers they pumped her with after cutting off her wings, has the crazy urge to laugh and ask him what his stage name is if that's his real one. Telling him that the wings grow back was stupid. He's a little boy pulling the wings off a fly, except someone gave him enough money and guns to pull the wings off mutants instead. No doubt other mutants have lost more. Angel can't see anyone in the other cells, but she hears the screams sometimes.

Trask takes her to his lab to show her what he's doing with her wing tissue. He's interested in the regenerative abilities her mutation gives her, or part of her. He says words like _your natural human camouflage_ and prods her back, where the tattoos are just barely starting to reappear. He has no interest in her as a woman. When he talks in his dust-dry scientist voice, he never looks below her neck. Most of the time he looks at his research.

She could ask why she gets special treatment. There's no need for Trask to pull her out of her cell; she can regenerate just as well behind bars. Trask isn't the type of guy to give painkillers to most of his subjects, either. That mystery gets solved by accident: an attendant mutters about a mutant going into shock as they cut off pieces of him. Can't see a regeneration if the subject is dead or damaged beyond repair.

Angel's back itches as her wings heal. As far as she can tell, she's no good to Trask after he gets a sample of her regrown wings, or whatever he's after. He might cut her wings off a couple more times in the name of science, but as soon as he gets bored, he'll kill her and he'll dissect her. Maybe he'll pin her on a board, like a butterfly.

She looks around on every march through the corridors, but can't figure a way out of Trask Industries. The guards are exactly like the CIA goons from years ago: they have guns and they don't think she's a person. And Angel is numb all the time, first from the painkillers swimming through her system, then from the lack of them. She can't muster the energy to flirt with the youngest guard, maybe distract him enough to leave her cell door unlocked. Something inside of her is clipped along with her wings, and that part isn't growing back.

For the first time in years, Angel wishes she could call her mother. _Was it like this for you, too?_

There are no escape routes this time, no way for her wings to carry her off. In the end, it takes an outside force to save her.

*

Angel can never be sure of the time of day, since there are no windows in her cell. She thinks it's night when the explosions start. She sits up in bed, listening as the shouts and bangs grow louder, and extends her wings voluntarily for the first time since arriving here. Her muscles quiver in anticipation.

A single guard sprints into the area. He meets Angel's stare and his eyes flare yellow. Mystique, wearing the guard's body from the neck down, presses her thumb against the lock on the door. "I thought you might be here," she says. No recrimination in her words, no _you did nothing for the Brotherhood after you fought your old friends in Cuba._ That's the thing about genuinely seeing mutants as part of one big brotherhood: it makes forgiveness easier. Angel has no such compunctions, but now she owes Mystique her life.

"I don't know how long I've been here," Angel says. Her voice wavers; tears blur her vision. Tired and numb as she is, she still longed for freedom in some secret corner of her heart.

Despite the chaotic sounds growing ever nearer, Mystique pulls Angel into a tight, fierce hug. She's careful not to crush Angel's wings.

Time grinds to a halt as Angel takes in every detail. Mystique's arms around her promise strength and violence to their enemies, but gentleness to Angel herself. Her thumbs rub in small circles on Angel's bare back, and Angel dredges up the strength to return the embrace. Mystique's blue skin is warm under her fingers; despite the scales, her natural form is warm-blooded. Angel laughs a little at herself for noticing that of all things, and time flows again.

Too soon, Mystique steps back, one hand going to her gun as she cocks her head, listening to the muffled shouting in the distance. "They'll check here next," she says. "Can you run?"

Angel stands up. "I can fly."

Mystique's face splits in a grin. "That's what I wanted to hear."

Luckily, the shirt they gave Angel to wear is cut low in the back, the better to monitor the progress of her wing regeneration. She follows Mystique on foot through the twists and turns of the hallways. Mystique must have gotten access to blueprints, because she never falters as she leads them away from the crashing and shouting.

One lab tech stumbles into their path, but Mystique takes her gun from its holster and he runs away, hands in the air. "Humans," she sneers, but doesn't pull the trigger. Something inside Angel loosens. Mystique chooses when to deploy her power. For a moment, Angel lets herself regret what they could have had together, then focuses. They could have a future still, if they make it out alive.

"What about the others?" she asks when they make it to an open door, the lock melted into a still-bubbling puddle on the floor. Outside, the night sky beckons, and the air is warm. Has it been weeks since her capture, or months?

"I got word that there was a big dissection night in the works. They wanted to make room for more mutants. All the other captives were in the labs tonight, about to go under the knife," Mystique says. She maintains a flat tone right up until the last word, which vibrates with horror and hatred. She pauses, swallows. "One of them said there was a woman here with wings."

Angel glances over her shoulder, where her wings are almost complete. She can fly with the last few inches missing, although she won't be able to cover the kind of distance or soar to the same heights with a full set. As much as it's going to draw out their escape, those missing few inches seem to have saved her life. "Thanks. How's Magneto?"

Mystique makes a disgusted noise. "Still arrested. It's just me trying to stop Trask."

Something inside the facility explodes and they both flinch. "Well, you're doing a better job than he would, anyway," Angel says. She extends her wings as wide as she can, willing those last few inches to fill in. Trask never bothered to ask if she had any control over the regeneration. He saw her as little better than an animal, and what animal could plan for the future?

Beads of sweat are running down her face and Angel is suddenly, ravenously hungry, but the last threads of tissue connect. She gives an experimental flutter of her wings and lets herself smile. "Want a lift?"

"We just have to get a couple miles down the road. I've got a getaway car that's a little less conspicuous than you and me flying through the air," Mystique says. She's grinning again, teeth white in the deep blue of her face. "I could kiss you."

"Later," Angel says, a promise to herself as much as Raven, and then: "Hang on tight." Her back to the labs, the moon over her head, Angel lifts them both away.


End file.
